Joe and Ann Pollack, St. Louis' most experienced food writers, lead a tour of restaurants, wines, shops and other interesting places. When we travel, you will travel with us. When we eat, drink, cook, entertain or read, we'll share our knowledge and opinions. Come along for the ride!!
Copyright 2013, Ann Lemons Pollack.

August 29, 2017

I first met Agnes Wilcox as one of the coterie of friends that were one of my husband’s inadvertent wedding gifts to me. She, too, was married to a theatre critic, Bob Wilcox, but in addition was running The New Theatre Company, which she’d founded. This meant, theoretically, that she was someone about whom I was to remain neutral.

As anyone who knew her will attest, that proved to be impossible. Agnes shimmered. Yes, she was physically attractive, but that wasn’t the thing – energy radiated from her, and enthusiasm as well. She wasn’t one of those hyperactive types – at least not when she was off duty, which is where I knew her – but she was interested in pretty much everything, not just theatre.

It’s not fair to say she collected interesting people. That makes it sound like deliberate, curated choices. People from many backgrounds, not just the arts, were drawn to her, and, more significantly, gathered in by her. The people at their house came from all over the globe and represented all sorts of occupations. One of her great skills was that she was an asker of superb questions, no matter the age of the person on the receiving end. And she would listen carefully and grasp the answer, allowing the other person to expound at any length needed. Only occasionally was a tactful diversion ever needed. This made her a fine hostess, and an exceptionally good friend.

Memories of everything from running into her at a resale shop – the source, she said, of much of her elegantly boho wardrobe – to hearing her guffaw at a ribald story told in her kitchen as we broke the set after a party run through my brain.

July 14, 2017

This is not a review. It was going to be, but things happened. I had brunch with four friends at Evangeline’s Bistro and Music House. I’ve had brunch there before, and was happy with the food, the service, and of course the music. I wrote about that here.

But:

Our food arrived 90 minutes after our reservation time, 85 minutes after we sat down. Our table of five did get beverages during that time, and we saw a two-top seated after us eat and leave before our food arrived. The inside was full, and the outside was busy also. It wasn’t the servers’ fault; they were flying around constantly. My friends remarked that this had happened to them on their last visit a couple of months earlier but that they’d thought it was a one-time glitch.

The bananas Foster stuffed French toast could have benefited from a longer bath in the egg batter to soften up the bread’s crust, but otherwise was quite tasty. The glazed bacon is thick and high-quality, chewy rather than crisp. And the coffee was passable.

It turned out to be a gobble ‘n run meal for me, so no tasting around (except from some nicely-seasoned Brabant potatoes). But that wait was completely unacceptable. It was the crowning touch after the manager’s thousand-mile stare as he avoided the hostess-less hostess, people lining up out the door waiting for the empty tables, plus his insistence that it was impossible that the host of our group had made a reservation with a specification like inside/outside or table/booth, because they never accepted such restrictions.

If this had been a one-off, well, everyone has shifts from hell. But if it’s a recurrent problem – and asking around after this experience, I heard more stories – then it’s not respecting the people who are paying for everything in the restaurant and who hope for a good experience. There are places who think that customers will come anyway. I surely hope Evangeline’s isn’t going to turn into that kind of a place. It has too much going for it otherwise.

May 06, 2017

As the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis goes on in high gear, there are a couple of ways to participate that involve food. Both occur on Sunday.

There are still tables available at the jazz brunch The Dark Room at the Grandel is doing. If you’re going on to a matinee and show your tickets, you’ll get a free mimosa, too. It kicks off at 11 a.m., and you can learn more about it here.

February 27, 2017

Speaking of reminders of coming events, please don’t forget that the sixth and final BRIEFS Festival of Short LGBTQ plays is coming up. It’s at the new .ZACK Performing Arts Center, which is at 3224 Locust, just east of Grand Center, on March 9-11. Evenings at 8, plus a Saturday matinee at 4 p.m.

The festival is also raising money and donating it to the International Institute of St. Louis and the Islamic Foundation of St. Louis as a gesture of solidarity among minority communities. An amusing evening, and with Pearl Vodka as a sponsor, you can be sure there's a bar.

February 26, 2017

It's getting on to that time again. The annual St. Louis Theater Circle awards are coming up on March 20. Again this year, we're holding it at the Viragh Center at Chaminade College Preparatory School at 425 South LIndbergh between Olive and I-64, a great venue with lots of room. This isn’t just for people who work in theatre. Here's a chance for theatre-lovers to chat with the people who appear on local stages, to find out just who it is that creates those great sets or directs the plays that always create conversations

It's all very comfortable-feeling, although many of us use this as an excuse to dress up a little, just for the fun of it. The evening is preceded by an optional and very tasty buffet, and there is - gasp - a bar open as well. (The buffet, from With Love Catering, includes two drink tickets.)The buffet opens at 5.30 p.m., and the ceremony begins at 7 p.m. It's a great party, and, yes, it's a cliche but everyone really is welcome.

January 11, 2017

Mixing the arts together is always an interesting idea, and mostly it’s a good one. Opera Theatre of St. Louis is indulging in just that with a series of get-togethers at venues throughout the area, mixing food, drink and music.

It’s not quite “dinner and a show”, but almost. It’s (probably heavy) appetizers and some beverages, plus four young singers with work that ranges across the history of opera. And the price is very reasonable, from $20 to $25 a head. The gatherings begin January 25 and run through the following Monday. And as for the venues - well, here's your chance to mix it up and hear opera in the National Blues Museum, for one site.

October 21, 2016

Just a reminder that The Every 28 Hours Plays will have what seems to be its final appearance in St. Louis Monday night. Developed in conjunction with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it’s a series of one-minute plays from many authors. It was created in the aftermath of Ferguson.

This October, the plays are being staged in a number of significant venues, including the Long Wharf Theatre In New Haven, CT, and the Kennedy Center in Washington.

It’s on the Mainstage at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts at Webster University, where Repertory Theatre St. Louis works, at 8 p.m. Monday, October 24. There is no admission; this is a labor of love to engage communities in dialogue between law enforcement – who had voices in the making of these plays – and the public.

May 23, 2016

Good news. The St. Louis Media History Foundation’s new exhibit at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum is now open. And it’s about food. We – I’m on the board of the Foundation and I helped curate this exhibit – are showing off some fascinating and sometimes quite handsome stuff from the Foundation’s collection.

Most of what we have is advertising from local companies, some forgotten and some still very much with us. We’ve got a loop playing of a cooking program from the early days of St. Louis radio. There are some restaurant ads, some blowups of newspaper stories and covers of magazines.

It’s a lovely building, although, alas, not wheelchair-accessible. The room that the Karpeles has given the Foundation is air conditioned, another plus.

May 03, 2016

I had lunch with a friend from Kansas City today, and took her into La Patisserie Chouquette afterwards. Simone Faure's work is always dazzling, of course. Just take a look at the cakes she's doing for Mothers' Day. Alas, they just stopped taking orders for them as we stood at the caisse ready to pay for the armload my pal was taking on the westward trek home. But as Toni was signing for her goodies, I spotted this. And, yes, it is a cake.

There's a sitdown area and beverages available to go with individual servings of her treats.

April 29, 2016

On Sunday, May 15, the last day of the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis, Slide Piece Food Truck is making a guest appearance. From 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. they'll be near Strauss Park in Grand Center, offering sustenance to theater-goers. That's a busy afternoon, with four different matinee performances, a couple of lectures, a final 6 p.m. play and, for a perfect closing day, the Stella Shouting Contest (sponsored appropriately enough by Stella Artois), which will be in Strauss Park at 2 p.m.

Besides some items from their usual menu, which is available here. they'll be serving festival-themed sandwiches like "A Slider Named Desire", "Lamb on a Hot Tin Roof" and the enticing-sounding "Summer and Smoke", which is a pork steak with goat cheese sriracha, pickled vegetables and cilantro.

April 26, 2016

The Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis kicks off May 11. It's going to be a long weekend that's a whirlwind of interesting things to see and hear. There's the familiar, The Glass Menagerie from Upstream Theatre, and a public screening of the film, A Streetcar Named Desire, which will run on a continuous loop. But there's also a number of the lesser-known works, like A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and Midnight Company's The Two-Character Play. Actress Olympia Dukakis comes in for an evening discussing her work and giving us monologues from Williams' works, including The Rose Tattoo. Lots more, of course; see the website for details.

Is there a food connection? Tennessee Williams was not known as a food writer, although his play A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur has a fair amount of it, including the immortal line, "Which came first, fried chicken or devilled eggs?" (I did discover that there's a Tennessee Williams cookbook out there, although an homage rather than a collection of Miss Edwina's recipes.) There may be an aggregation of food trucks during the festival, but that's still not confirmed. Nevertheless, it should be A Lovely Weekend for St. Louis.

April 22, 2016

Another food movie is opening April 29 at the Plaza Frontenac. DOUGH is about a failing kosher bakery in London and the search for an apprentice. I haven't seen it - yet - but in the meantime, here's something to whet our appetites.

There's a local promotion being done in several markets where the movie has or is about to open, each involving a local bakery. In St. Louis, it involves rugelach from Sugaree Baking Company as part of the prize package. Pat Rutherford-Pettine' rugelach are, well, wondrous is a pretty good description, flaky and swooning on the tongue. All an entry involves is liking and sharing their Facebook page:

April 15, 2016

Ah, the Fedora Cafe at Union Station and what we learned from it. Modern American first reared his head about then. Union Station was the place to be, for strolling, stopping, eating and drinking, and Fedora, an early outpost of the Gilbert-Robinson group, led the way. I had my first interview with a nationally-known cookbook author there, Barbara Olney, who was doing a demo of her book on chocolate. It was more like a conversation than a formal interview, as it turned out. We were both single women, and at one point when we were talking about men, she said of a former (oh, definitely former) swain, "He wouldn't let me cook for him. Can you imagine?"

February 10, 2016

I'm on the board of the St. Louis Media History Foundation. That's because they have a scholarship in Joe's name and I'm honored to have a finger in that pie. Now the folks at 1111 Mississippi have put together a dinner that celebrates Chef Bob Colosimo's win as chef of the year from the local chapter of the American Culinary Federation and the win in the Taste of St. Louis Chef's Battle Royal. Part of the proceeds go to the Media History Foundation. The menu that night is a recreation of those dishes.

What will we eat? An egg raviolo on chicken hash. Crispy coconut skate wing with rice noodles in lobster broth. (Can't go wrong with skate wing, I always say.) Horseradish-coated roasted sirloin with parsnip-potato mashers, napa cabbage, and horseradish crisp. (No idea on that last one, sorry.) For dessert, white and dark chocolate mousses with a pear sorbet. And all this is $50.

February 25 is the night of the dinner. The menu will be available all evening. When you call for a reservation, or email, say you want the Winner's Dinner. I understand the regular menu will also be available that evening.

Oh, and one more thing - that amount doesn't include drinks or the gratuity. But we look forward to seeing you there. A good cause and good food: What could be bad?

January 15, 2016

Another of the Great Eaters has left us. Herb Weitman passed away earlier this week. Herb was known to long-time readers of Pollack food writing (from long before I joined the team) as the Old China Hand.

He and Joe met when they both worked for the St. Louis football Cardinals, Joe as their PR director and Herb as their photographer. The friendship was cemented over many dinner tables. As Joe often said, "We didn't always win on Sunday afternoons. But we made sure we always won on Saturday night." Tales of dinners both on the road and at home, things like Gourmet Night at the old Kemoll's on North Grand, were available at the drop of a hint, or even less, from either of them.

But Herb's main gastronomic passion was Asian food. He had happily branched out from Chinese food and knocked back sushi and other Japanese, Thai, Korean, you name it, mostly the hotter the better. Not that he was narrow-minded about what he ate. Restaurateurs all over town recognized him - although a few would confuse him with Joe. Two bald guys with glasses; why not? Vince Bommarito of Tony's, when told of his death, said, "I knew something was wrong when we didn't see them New Year's Eve."

He believed in the healing qualities of food, not in a nutritional sense but in a spiritual sense. About two months before Joe and I were to be married, Joe became frighteningly ill and I didn't leave the hospital for a number of days. Herb, by then a widower like Joe, was beside himself. Finally, when things stabilized, he insisted on taking me to get something to eat. "It's the only thing I know to do," he explained. It was, of course, Chinese food.

Herb was the best man when we married in a room at Jewish Hospital, and Joe Rosenblum, the rabbi who married us and who shared football seats with Joe and Herb, will give his eulogy Sunday. Our wedding present from him was one of his photographs.It was of Cardinals quarterback Charley Johnson in the November 15, 1964, game known as the mud bowl. Joe, needless to say, was delighted.

Herb remarried a couple of years later, and his wife Diane, aka The Lovely Mrs. Hand, and I became good friends. The four of us shared numberless meals, both Asian and non-, and traded lots of stories. He was always a pleasure to cook for. He was a great photographer, to be sure. But he was a better feinschmecker.

December 11, 2015

Whaddya doing Sunday (December 13) for brunch? Tenacious Eats, the outfit that matches up dinner and a vintage movie, is doing a benefit brunch this Sunday at and for Food Outreach. Waffles! Mimosas! Chocolate milk! (Omelets and a carving station, too.) Music, movies, and a dress code so deeply relaxed that pajamas and costumes are, in their words, "deeply encouraged".

November 25, 2015

One of my favorite restaurants ever, I came to love Elsah Landing, and indeed the lovely little village of Elsah, totally by accident. My then-husband showed it to me on a drive up to meet his family not too long after we met. Many years later, after a remarkably calm divorce, I would drive the kids up to his home town, where he was living by then, drop them, and return to St. Louis with a stop for pie in Elsah.

October 29, 2015

One of the original members of Joe's Class of '72, the restaurants that he said changed St. Louis dining, Balaban's started hot and stayed that way.

Probably my strongest memories of it come from the sleep-hungry hours after working an overnight shift in an ICU at Barnes. Sometimes one of my colleagues and I would decide that our spirits needed more encouragement than our bodies did, and we would head for an indulgent breakfast in the cafe section. Perhaps what the bodies were craving was that sunlight falling through the east-facing windows as we could finally relax. But it was the hot croissants, gently pulled apart as their flakes fell everywhere, that rewarded us. Coffee, delicious and so different from the vile industrial stuff at the hospital, was almost inhaled - we were too young for it to keep us awake when we went home and off to bed. I know there was orange juice, too, but I remember it only for how it looked on the table. The cafe was always nearly empty, so we could talk shop, in the clinically specific, horrifying-to-outsiders way that nurses can do.

Years later, after I married Joe and was living a very different life, we went to Herb Balaban Karp's memorial service down the street. Everyone returned to the restaurant - specifically, the bar, of course - to drink and reminisce and generally schmooze. It was a daylight version of the late-night bar gatherings that happened in the old days. But no guy with a moustache and suspenders to keep an eye on things.

October 15, 2015

How many stories are there about Riddle's? One Sunday night in late November of 1994, I had my wedding supper (the wonderful shiitake mushrooms) there. Alone. Joe was in the hospital recovering from emergency life-saving surgery and we moved the date of our planned nuptials up so I could take advantage of the then-new Family Medical Leave Act. "What's new?" asked chef-proprietor Andy Ayres when he left the kitchen to patrol the bar. "I got married today," I said, still a little surprised at my daring act. "Well...," he said and paused, "I guess that's good."

For a long time, Andy was the only restaurant person who knew that I, the food writer, had a day job as a chemotherapy nurse. The two occupations do seem at odds with each other until one realizes that hospital food is enough, most of the time (and all of the time back then), to drive one to maniacal searching for the good stuff. I wasn't eager to have the word out on the street. As far as I know, Andy was completely discreet.

September 08, 2015

St. Louis has never had a restaurant more elegant for its time than the original Anthony's. The French sibling of Tony's, it was lush and intimate and left clients feeling as coddled as if they were on eiderdown. Here's a little more about it.

And I certainly remember a particular romantic lunch, but that's another story.

July 30, 2015

Not having grown up in St. Louis, I only occasionally encountered the Parkmoor until someone put me onto their onion rings tragically late in the history of this St. Louis standard. But the people that loved really loved it, apparently. Somewhere out there, there surely are car hops with great stories.

June 02, 2015

Free Donuts (their spelling, not mine) on Friday at Jazz at the Bistro. Fifteen different providers with offerings. I'm one of the judges. Drop by when you get up or on your way to work or even on your way to bed.

April 29, 2015

Relative radio silence here is related to a new baby in the family and a college graduation. Things should get back to perking soon. In the meanwhile, I've got some stuff here in the St. Louis Magazine Food Lovers Guide. And there's about to be discussion of a jazz bar. So stay tuned, please.